Category Archives: Deontology and Moral Responsibility
‘Liability without Wrongdoing’
Rebecca Stone, ‘Private Liability without Wrongdoing’, University of Toronto Law Journal (forthcoming 2022), available at SSRN (October 19, 2021 draft). Rebecca Stone’s fascinating and superb ‘Private Liability without Wrongdoing’ addresses a fundamental question: What is the relationship between moral wrongdoing and private law liability? On the face of it, moral wrongdoing is neither necessary nor […]
Aditi Bagchi, ‘Conflict, Consistency and the Role of Conventional Morality in Judicial Decision-Making’
ABSTRACT This article is part of a symposium on Cardozo’s classic text, The Nature of the Judicial Process. In his 1921 lecture, Cardozo defends a pragmatic approach to judicial decision-making. Judges should apply and develop legal rules with an eye toward their social function. ‘Public policy’ at this stage of decision-making theoretically could be rooted […]
Anthony Sangiuliano, ‘Bottom-Up and Top-Down Theories of Antidiscrimination Law’
ABSTRACT This paper restates and critically analyses two prevalent philosophical approaches towards studying antidiscrimination law. So-called ‘bottom-up’ approaches are committed to ‘moralism,’ the view that a discriminatory act’s being morally wrong gives a reason to legally prohibit it, and a ‘prescriptive’ method for theorizing about antidiscrimination law, which constructs a theory of the moral wrongness […]
Per-Erik Milam, Review of Andrew Cohen, Apologies and Moral Repair: Rights, Duties, and Corrective Justice (2020)
“It sometimes seems like the only thing more common in the news than an apology is conduct that calls for one. Apologies are part of our everyday ethical lives. In this book, Andrew Cohen argues that apologies are a means of moral repair that can be owed as a matter of justice. Victims can have […]
Dale Dorsey, ‘Friendship and the Wishes of the Dead’
ABSTRACT The wishes of the dead seem to have normative significance. We not only respect last wills and testaments, but we take seriously what the dead loved, what they valued, even after they have long escaped this mortal coil. But this presents a philosophical puzzle. Is this a normatively justified practice? Why should the fact […]
Steven Schaus, ‘A Simple Model of Torts and Moral Wrongs’
ABSTRACT According to the ‘standard model’ of torts and moral wrongs – the model implicit in leading moral theories of tort law – tort law imposes genuine duties that are distinct from, and only roughly coincide with, our preexisting moral duties. A ‘tort’, on this model, is a distinctive kind of wrong, the breach of […]
Sandy Steel, ‘Culpability and Compensation’
ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of moral culpability in relation to legal duties to compensate. It explains why duties to compensate generally arise independently of culpability, but why culpability considerations still play a role in determining the incidence and extent of compensatory liability. Despite the prevalence of culpability-independent liability in private law, I describe […]
Ori Herstein, ‘Reasons to Try’
ABSTRACT The value of trying is various and complex, yielding reasons to try to do numerous different things in diverse contexts. Demonstrating this richness, I draw on cultural insights and on examples from everyday life, with a special focus on the law and on morality. The paper builds on the work of John Gardner, who […]
Verdicchio and Perin, ‘When Doctors and AI Interact: on Human Responsibility for Artificial Risks’
ABSTRACT A discussion concerning whether to conceive Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems as responsible moral entities, also known as ‘artificial moral agents’ (AMAs), has been going on for some time. In this regard, we argue that the notion of ‘moral agency’ is to be attributed only to humans based on their autonomy and sentience, which AI […]
Mitchell Berman, ‘Blameworthiness, Desert, and Luck’
ABSTRACT Philosophers disagree about whether outcome luck can affect an agent’s ‘moral responsibility’. Focusing on responsibility’s ‘negative side’, some maintain, and others deny, that an action’s results bear constitutively on how ‘blameworthy’ the actor is, and on how much blame or punishment they ‘deserve’. Crucially, both sides to the debate assume that an actor’s blameworthiness […]